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The Historians' History of the World 06 [The Early Roman Empire]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
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Such things seem impossible to those who live beneath a civilisation which Christianity has influenced, however imperfectly, by its presence. And indeed it needs much—the concurrent testimony of poet, historian, and philosopher; the ruins of a hundred amphitheatres before our eyes; the frescoes of the Museo Borbonico; the very programmes of the performance, which something higher than accident has preserved; the incidental witness of an inspired apostle—it needs all this to convince us of the truth. But they are true, undisputed facts of history, and facts which carry with them no obscure intimation of the reasons which worked the fall of the imperial city. They prove that she deserved to fall, and by the hands of those in whose persons she had outraged humanity. It was not a poet remarkable for overstraining the religious sentiment of divine retribution, who wrote:
“Shall he expire,
And unavenged! Arise, ye Goths! and glut your ire.”
The gladiator, whether directly a captive or a refractory slave, was generally the child of those races who wreaked, in after times, a bloody vengeance upon the city of blood. And if her own degenerate sons, freedman, knight, or senator, nay, even her degraded daughters, descended into the arena and combated by his side, this could only bespeak her more entire debasement and unfitness to direct the destinies of the world.i
FOOTNOTES
[36] [It is well to bear in mind that a more optimistic view of the early empire has its supporters. As has already been pointed out, there are different estimates of such emperors as Tiberius. It is urged, also, that the cruelties and vices of the emperors affected but a limited circle; and that meantime the provinces might be well governed, healthful, and prosperous. It has been alleged, e.g., that Tiberius and Domitian ruled the provinces better than the Antonines.]
[37] The Appian way was the fashionable drive of the Roman nobility.
[38] The Romans rode in carriages on a journey, but rarely for amusement, and never within the city. Even beyond the wall it was considered disreputable to hold the reins one’s self, such being the occupation of the slave or hired driver. Juvenal ranks the consul, who creeps out at night to drive his own chariot, with the most degraded of characters: that he should venture to drive by daylight, while still in office, is an excess of turpitude transcending the imagination of the most sarcastic painter of manners as they were. And this was a hundred years later than the age of Augustus. See Juvenal, VIII, 145.
[39] The leges Juliæ allowed two hundred sesterces for a repast on ordinary days, three hundred on holidays, one thousand for special occasions, such as a wedding, etc. Gelliusd II, 24.
[40] The structor or carver was an important officer at the sideboard. Carving was even taught as an art, which, as the ancients had no forks (χειρονομᾶν, to manipulate, was the Greek term for it), must have required grace as well as dexterity. Moreau de Jonnès observes, with some reason, that the invention of the fork, apparently so simple, deserves to be considered difficult and recondite. The Chinese, with their ancient and elaborate civilisation, have failed to attain to it.
CHAPTER XXXIX. A HALF CENTURY OF DECLINE: COMMODUS TO ALEXANDER SEVERUS
The day of the death of Marcus Aurelius may be taken as the decisive moment in which the ruin of the old civilisation was determined.
Now after the great effort of reason in high places, after Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius, the reign of evil begins again, and is worse than ever. Farewell to goodness, farewell to reason! Now, all hail, folly! All hail, absurdity! All hail to the Syrian and his questionable gods! Genuine physicians have been able to do nothing; the sick man is more sick than ever: send for the charlatans.—Renan.
[161-183 A.D.]
We come now to a time of obvious decline. Even in the golden epoch the nation was probably static rather than progressive, notwithstanding the glory that surrounds the great names of its emperors. But now the deterioration is too rapid and too marked to be questioned. The period has no importance except as a transition time from the great days of the empire to the days of its degradation. Nevertheless, the events of this transition age marshal themselves before the eye in one of the most striking panoramas in all history. These events group themselves into a few strange scenes. The first shows us a philosopher’s son given over to the lowest forms of vice; demeaning himself in the arena; associating with gladiators and slaves; and finally coming to an ignominious death at the hands of his wife and freedmen, who kill him that their own lives may be saved.
The second scene shows us, in sharp contrast to the ignoble son of the philosopher, the noble son of a slave assuming the purple. Pertinax passes across the stage as a good old man, well-meaning, but incompetent to stem the tide of the times. He meets what may be called the normal imperial fate—assassination; and the historic stage is cleared for one of the strangest spectacles that it has yet witnessed—the auction of an empire. This, to be sure, is not the first time that money has made its power felt in the disposal of the imperial office. It has long been the custom for a new emperor to make “presents” to the soldiers. But now the affair is reduced to the frank terms of sale and purchase.
In due course the man who has thus bargained for an empire pays the penalty of his ambition; then a turmoil ensues between the rival aspirants to the succession, which ends, naturally enough, with the death of all but one; he, Septimius Severus by name, gives to the empire a moment of relative tranquillity; and at last presents a spectacle hardly less strange than all the others,—the spectacle of a Roman emperor dying a natural death. We shall not see the like again for many a reign.
Following Severus come his two sons, Caracalla and Geta. The former plays well the part of heartless despot; he kills his brother and slaughters a host of helpless subjects in the East; and then, to emphasise a paradox, grants the bauble of Roman citizenship to all subjects of the empire. In due course he meets the imperial death, and is succeeded by Macrinus, who, slain at once, is followed by Elagabalus. This degenerate youth typifies his era; sinks to depths of debauchery which horrify even the Roman conscience; introduces new forms of worship from the East; wins the title of Sardanapalus; and, finally, slaughtered, his body thrown into the Tiber, is nicknamed Tiberinus, in mocking remembrance of his ignoble death and yet more ignoble life.
And now, at last, a ray of light pierces the gloom, and with the coming of Alexander Severus there is a brief recrudescence of the days when Rome was something more than the battle-ground of mercenaries and the court of voluptuaries. Yet, in the end, even this good emperor meets the fate of all the rest. Truly, the time is out of joint.
Let us take up now in more detailed presentation—yet still as briefly as historical completeness will permit—the story of these strange events, beginning with the reign of that renegade Commodus, who owed his position on the throne to the parental affection rather than the philosophic judgment of the best of emperors.a
Commodus (180-192 A.D.)
Marcus Aurelius was succeeded by his son, usually known as Commodus, whose full name was Marcus Lucius Ælius Aurelius Commodus Antoninus. This unworthy scion of a glorious house was born at Lanuvium on the 31st of August, 161, and proclaimed cæsar on the 12th of October, 166. In the year 177 the tribunician authority was bestowed on Commodus and he was summoned to take his place as “augustus” by his father’s side.